Sunday, June 24, 2012

Clearing

Summer in South Georgia means the temperature is going to be
close to eighty even at three in the morning. Gone for another one hundred days or so are the
cool sunrises that are bug free and refreshing. This is like waking up in the mouth of a drunk
who lives under an overpass. The air in warm and sticky and even if you shower
in the morning just walking outside to pee makes you feel like you’ve been
hanging out in a locker room with the fat guys at the Y. Dawn is a couple of
hours away but there isn’t anything in the air that resembles night but the dark.

There was more burning yesterday but it wasn’t much
fun.I was tired when I started and I
never really got into a groove at all. I cut a path to the pond, realized a
fire there would have to wait until there was more time to burn, ha ha, and
worked on clearing the fence line instead. There are a lot of really large
weeds in that fenceline, and there’s an old dead tree that fell a few years
ago. I remember that tree fell one day when I was out in the yard working.Or more precisely it fell while I was having
lunch inside and when I went back outside there was a tree down. It wasn’t very
large, mind you, but it would have killed me had it landed on me. It landed on
the first fence I put up and never took down once I got the rest of the
property closed up. Now the fence has to be removed and the dead tree too, and into
the fire it goes.

This is the day of the Dead Tree and the stuff that has
built up over the years has to go. This will not be a fun fire because old wood
burns poorly and weakly, too. I’m a big fan of letting things go back to nature
but if I am to clear this fenceline this stuff has to go. I’m pushing nature
back another twenty feet or so and making the backyard more accessible to the
birds of prey that grab snakes.I’m also
clearing away some low hanging branches and I realize when this is all over
with my yard will look a lot like I’ve never really wanted it to look.

Next year I might turn some of this open area into a
garden, and plant some peach trees. I’m turning a lot of the stuff I’m raking
up into mulch so by next spring there ought to be plenty. There is a growing
pile of rich black soil in the mulch pile and this year I planted peppers and
tomatoes again, and hopefully they’ll do well. Once again I waited a little
late and should have gotten them out a month earlier.

Fire is a strange thing. I’ve seen people use diesel fuel
to start fires to clear land but they wind up with land that smells like diesel
fuel. I use old leaves instead, and I can get a fire to walk on the ground, in
the direction I want, simply by feeding leaves to the fire. This kills off the
underbrush, the thick stuff, and the briars that grow around here with stems as
thick as my thumb. The vines that have attached themselves to the young Oaks,
which I am leaving, curl up and wither. But the fire will go where it wants, and where
the wind blows so I must be careful. I can’t leave this one alone and hope it
will turn out well. But the fire moves
in and out of the fenceline, burning everything I want it too, clearing away a
decade of weeds, and opening up more space. To get into the backyard now means
having to cross over a wide plain with no cover.

If I expand the mulch pile then I’ll put it near the
firepit, which makes sense. But this
means killing off the weeds in that area and that means the yearly bloom of
tiny white flowers will never be again. The vines they spring from explode out
of the ground in late Summer and suddenly it looks like snow when they blossom.
They climb and intertwine around the dog
fennel and I hope to keep some of them but…

Lucas is healing well. The wound on his neck is nearly
healed and he hasn’t been slowed down at all because of this. He’s off all his
meds now and the swelling is long gone. I was told the hair would not grow back
but as the would heals it looks like it will, in fact grow back just like it
always was, without so much as a scar. The bite was not as bad as the one
suffered by another dog who was brought in the day after Lucas. That one didn’t
make it and his parents have to deal with making changes in their lives now,
much like I am doing, but in a much worse way. The vet told me they wanted to
save him, no matter what it cost, but the dog was small, the snake large, and
the venom too much.

There have been many snake bit dogs this year, more
snakes seen than normal, and more venomous snakes around than I remember. Elbow
has complained about the rat snakes in her henhouse and the vipers around her
yard.The vet told me she has treated
three dogs for bite this year.Lucas got
bit and not a week later I evicted another Cottonmouth. I cannot explain it.

My only theory is we had a very wet spring and perhaps
the wet weather along with the very hot May we had built up more ground cover
for them to move around in and closer too. The ones I have seen have been of
various sizes and it’s not like they migrate.So the Year of the Dead Tree, the Year of the Snake, and the Year of the
Fire continues.

4 comments:

((((hugs))) for your insomnia. I understand. It is a terrible thing when there is a threat to one's children, and they are, in fact, your children, and you are responsible, and the urge to protect them is so very strong. I am thankful to hear that Lucas is almost well... and sad to hear that you are going to have all this cleared area to mow and trim and keep manicured so as to not be attractive to snakes.There is something on NG, a series on swarms of animals of all types, and how that relates to food, and rain, and other things, and I assume the snakes swarming is probably the result of something too beneficial to their food supply sometime in the last year or two, resulting in far too many, this year, for the food that is available in that area... so they hunt further afield.I hope you can control them. I know you love snakes, too. It's a hard choice for you.

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My writing reflects the things I see, think, and experience, and those things in my past that have led me to be me. It is not always pretty, it is not always funny, and no one has ever made mention of my life as a Disney Movie. If sex, drugs, profanity, or a general irreverence for all things religious somehow offends you, well, there are other blogs which will satisfy your need for self assurance.